Sister Cecilia's mission: becoming neighbours in Nepal’s remote valleys
The religious sister is the first female director of Caritas Nepal. She spoke to AsiaNews about her social work and missionary commitment in a country ravaged by landslides, floods, and earthquakes, where many people live at a subsistence level in inaccessible places, between tropical forest and the Himalayas. In rural groups and cooperatives, women represent 60-70 per cent of participants.
Kathmandu – Sister Cecilia Durga Shrestha, the first woman to lead a major organisation in Nepal, is not very shy.
“I am a sister in an order founded to provide education and autonomy to slaves,” she explained. “In India, I had already worked 24/7 on emergencies with victims of child labour, so coming here and accepting the mission of Caritas Nepal was very inspiring. I feel it's mine, despite the cultural resistance to female leadership."
Hindus are the majority in the country, which has a substantial Buddhist population. While the government has banned proselytising by other religious groups, it works closely with Caritas Nepal because if it is one of the most reliable and best organised agencies for tackling social and environmental emergencies.
"We chose four areas of intervention: sustainability and climate change, human rights and empowerment, risk reduction and community resilience, humanitarian intervention and assistance,” Sister Cecilia explained.
“What I enjoy most is working on the ground. For us, the word 'compassion' becomes action, and when we enter the homes of those who are suffering the most, they are amazed at our motivation to be there with them."
Nepal has a highly decentralised administration, with few and slow means of communication. In this context, Caritas operates with a staff of about 150 people, in local communities and remote provinces. The employees understand needs and situations and can develop long-term development solutions, often starting with things that are truly small, yet crucial to a rural civilisation.
Radha is one of the beneficiaries. A woman from Baghmati (Lalitpur), she was able to take a course on winter vegetables and now grows seven varieties to cover all her family's needs. Another is Janu, a woman from Khatyad who received two rabbits and now breeds them. Purna Singh, a farmer from Nawalparasi, trained to prepare natural pest controls and now no longer needs to pay the high price of chemical pesticides.
“The fact that most of us are Hindu, not Catholic, facilitates a relationship of trust with local communities; they see that we work together regardless of religion, caste, or creed, even if the problems related to caste discrimination are far from over, even within our own ranks...”
Around the table, in Caritas’s welcoming and sunbathed headquarters in Kathmandu, sits a small, well-established team of representatives, men and women, from all areas of work. They told me in detail about the types of situations they face and the strategies they learnt since 1991 to optimise the limited resources available.
“We can say that we've responded to more than a thousand disasters, both big and small: earthquakes, fires, lightning, ordinary floods, but also major quakes like the one in 2015, whose images went around the world.”
This author saw this for himself the day after one such case during an inspection in the Balthali area, a few hours from the capital, where I was sent to follow Ramesh.
“Travelling by jeep, motorbike, or even on foot between villages connected by small forest paths, I saw firsthand how support for families and communities has come, year after year, through small but crucial opportunities.”
The latter include training to improve farming practices and output; a pair of goats to start a small farm and provide daily milk; a school serving as a reference point for a deprived and isolated area; materials to rebuild a hut in the aftermath of an earthquake; a tank to collect drinking water, which is abundant in the forest but difficult to access in the quantity needed for an entire village, especially in the dry season.
"We devote a lot of energy to the education and training of those who carry out the projects over time, even without our presence. We develop, for example, disaster-related skills in village groups and schools, including how to obtain information, organise preparations, and formulate survival and resilience plans for such situations, which are so common in our country.”
In rural groups and cooperatives, 60-70 per cent of participants are women, which raises another important issue, that of female empowerment in a country where patriarchal culture is still very harshly enforced and normalised, with the practice of child marriage hard to stop.
“One of our priorities, in emergencies, is to hand out a special kit to women with menstrual hygiene materials, as well as specific nutrients for breastfeeding and pregnant women... We have several organisations run by women's groups, allowing us to strengthen their ability to defend their rights, seek funding from the government and local authorities, and start independent businesses or farming cooperatives."
In discussions, planning evolves with the country’s situation. Most recently, GenZ youth groups sparked an historic uprising in September 2025 ousting the incumbent government, which was replaced by a transitional administration. Led by Sushila Karki, Nepal’s first female prime minister, the new government is preparing fresh democratic elections for March 2026.
Notwithstanding the violence that accompanied the revolution, the demands that it generated appear to be widely shared, reflecting the daily experience and persistent inequalities that can be seen around the country.
Severe isolation and social fragmentation, poor healthcare and schooling, limited access to higher education, and lack of significant government action to mitigate the risk of environmental disasters are but some of the issues.
This author saw further evidence of this while visiting settlements in Temal, a region that is five-hour drive on dirt roads from Kathmandu, hosted by Tamang families who, with the support of several European associations, are trying to improve local services (health, education, aqueducts). This is also made possible by the revival of “mala”, expensive and highly prized beads used in making sacred bracelets and necklaces used in Buddhism to count repetitions during mantras.
Yet contradictions abound in this community, a reflection of what is happening in the country as a whole. While many young people flock to the capital to study or move abroad to work, in Arab countries, for example, some local, isolated Indigenous communities are still capable of preserving rituals, ecosystems, and traditional medicine. Still, rural regions remain fragile, caught between ancestral subsistence practices and new opportunities offered by hiking tourism and university studies.
Nepal is eager for social development, improved livelihoods, and the education of new generations. Organisations like Caritas Nepal, which have been working on such matters for over 30 years, are now more than ever in the right place to continue their work, seeking greater support from communities and governments, as well as external funding.
They are, however, conscious of the risks to a people that aspires to change without adequate cultural tools, and that could delude itself into believing that the rights of the many prevail over the interests of the few, in a world increasingly prey to oligarchies ready to do anything to meet new global challenges.
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31/10/2025 23:00
